Boy, you are so right about this - the social sciences hold a lot of sway in higher education because they present themselves as having data-driven answers to everyone's problems. But because their subject is most often mutable, capricious people, these answers change all of the time; upper admin worships at the social science altar, but it's all just an over-funded shot in the dark. I guess that's my own bias coming through, but I've been teaching college for 40 years.....
You need to stop drawing false conclusions. You so desperately want there to be a causal effect between the political orientation of some professors and the overall performance of their field that you're jumping to a lot of conclusions. In doing so, you're doing exactly what you accuse them of doing.
I've mentioned this aspect as well in pretty much every story I've written. I don't know why you want to brush away the ideological bias part but it's absolutely real, too, and I don't even think controversial to state at this point. Anyway it's all part of the same story: both carelessness and bias lead to the same endpoint: inaccurate research that can't be replicated. More adversarial peers would solve a lot of this.
I'm not saying there isn't bias, I'm saying that your claim that it's the cause of the problem has no evidence! You're leaping to conclusions based on your personal opinion. There is no evidence that political orientation affects the peer review process of science.
Meanwhile, I posted an article covering actual data on why we see these problems. It has nothing to do with political orientation!
Glad we agree there's bias! I’m not claiming a monocausal explanation, and I’ve explicitly acknowledged issues like fraud and publish or perish incentives both in my stories on this topic and linked. But I think it’s a mistake to brush away what I'm trying to say in the story.
We have strong evidence large portions of academia, especially in social science fields, are politically homogeneous, I've read the literature on this topic well. I've even talked to some academics personally. None of it is controversial at this point. And in any domain, when a group shares similar priors, it shapes what questions get asked, what gets funded, what gets published, and what gets challenged. That is absolutely not speculation, it’s basic sociology of institutions.
The replication crisis itself doesn’t require a single cause. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a system where incentives (publish-or-perish), low replication rates, and intellectual homogeneity all interact. Fraud explains some cases. Sloppiness explains others. But a lack of adversarial scrutiny—whether ideological or otherwise—helps weak results survive longer than they should.
But there is no evidence! You are trying to reason into some strange justification for why your preferred reason has some kind of causal relationship. But if it did, we'd have evidence.
In fact, in your piece you even write that reproducibility is improving in the social sciences - with no meaningful change in political orientation. That's great evidence that the problem was part of the systems of review and incentives and not the political orientation of anyone involved.
I actually think we’re closer on this topic than it seems. I’m not arguing for a single cause, and I agree incentives and fraud matter a lot. But it’s just not accurate to say there’s “no evidence” that ideology plays any role. Let's share some final thoughts to address the "no evidence" aspect since there's probably 1,000s of things we could share.
-Political homogeneity is well-documented. For ex, Jonathan Haidt and colleagues (including the Heterodox Academy work) show large imbalances in political representation across many social science fields. Homogeneity affects outcomes in group systems. This isn’t even a political claim, it’s really just basic institutional behavior.
-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions lays out how shared paradigms shape what gets studied and accepted, and more recent work (e.g., James A. Evans on intellectual narrowing) shows that less diverse perspectives can reduce novelty and scrutiny.
-There’s also direct evidence adjacent to this: audit-style studies (like Yoel Inbar & Joris Lammers, 2012) found some willingness among academics to discriminate based on political views in hiring contexts.
So I'm okay with saying the claim may not be just “ideology caused the replication crisis.” I think I could agree with: when you combine (a) publish-or-perish incentives, (b) low replication norms, and (c) intellectual homogeneity, you should expect weaker ideas to face less adversarial testing and persist longer.
On your last point, reproducibility improving without changes in political makeup actually fits this model pretty well. It suggests that changing incentives and norms (more replication, preregistration, etc.) increases rigor, even if underlying biases remain. That doesn’t mean the biases don’t exist, it means the system is compensating for them better.
To me this is a bit of a “water is wet” situation: in any field, if people largely share priors, it will shape what gets questioned and what doesn’t. The debate is about how much that matters, not whether it exists at all. This was enjoyable I appreciate your commentary.
I'm not going to argue this further, because we are far apart. You clearly want political orientation to be a cause of something for which there is no direct evidence, meanwhile we have direct evidence of real causes that are being addressed and causing change.
Might there be other factors in the replication crisis? Sure! But we can't take one that you prefer and insert it without evidence. If it is a cause, then evidence will be found but until then it's just conjecture that it's even related.
Germane: "The poison was never forced. It was offered gently, until you forgot it was poison at all." —Mark Twain
Pefect quote for the problem at hand
Boy, you are so right about this - the social sciences hold a lot of sway in higher education because they present themselves as having data-driven answers to everyone's problems. But because their subject is most often mutable, capricious people, these answers change all of the time; upper admin worships at the social science altar, but it's all just an over-funded shot in the dark. I guess that's my own bias coming through, but I've been teaching college for 40 years.....
Very timely. Thanks.
You need to stop drawing false conclusions. You so desperately want there to be a causal effect between the political orientation of some professors and the overall performance of their field that you're jumping to a lot of conclusions. In doing so, you're doing exactly what you accuse them of doing.
In reality, a lot of this is driven by the same forces that have resulted in fake papers being published in STEM fields. There is a detailed breakdown here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html
I've mentioned this aspect as well in pretty much every story I've written. I don't know why you want to brush away the ideological bias part but it's absolutely real, too, and I don't even think controversial to state at this point. Anyway it's all part of the same story: both carelessness and bias lead to the same endpoint: inaccurate research that can't be replicated. More adversarial peers would solve a lot of this.
I'm not saying there isn't bias, I'm saying that your claim that it's the cause of the problem has no evidence! You're leaping to conclusions based on your personal opinion. There is no evidence that political orientation affects the peer review process of science.
Meanwhile, I posted an article covering actual data on why we see these problems. It has nothing to do with political orientation!
Glad we agree there's bias! I’m not claiming a monocausal explanation, and I’ve explicitly acknowledged issues like fraud and publish or perish incentives both in my stories on this topic and linked. But I think it’s a mistake to brush away what I'm trying to say in the story.
We have strong evidence large portions of academia, especially in social science fields, are politically homogeneous, I've read the literature on this topic well. I've even talked to some academics personally. None of it is controversial at this point. And in any domain, when a group shares similar priors, it shapes what questions get asked, what gets funded, what gets published, and what gets challenged. That is absolutely not speculation, it’s basic sociology of institutions.
The replication crisis itself doesn’t require a single cause. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a system where incentives (publish-or-perish), low replication rates, and intellectual homogeneity all interact. Fraud explains some cases. Sloppiness explains others. But a lack of adversarial scrutiny—whether ideological or otherwise—helps weak results survive longer than they should.
But there is no evidence! You are trying to reason into some strange justification for why your preferred reason has some kind of causal relationship. But if it did, we'd have evidence.
In fact, in your piece you even write that reproducibility is improving in the social sciences - with no meaningful change in political orientation. That's great evidence that the problem was part of the systems of review and incentives and not the political orientation of anyone involved.
I actually think we’re closer on this topic than it seems. I’m not arguing for a single cause, and I agree incentives and fraud matter a lot. But it’s just not accurate to say there’s “no evidence” that ideology plays any role. Let's share some final thoughts to address the "no evidence" aspect since there's probably 1,000s of things we could share.
-Political homogeneity is well-documented. For ex, Jonathan Haidt and colleagues (including the Heterodox Academy work) show large imbalances in political representation across many social science fields. Homogeneity affects outcomes in group systems. This isn’t even a political claim, it’s really just basic institutional behavior.
-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions lays out how shared paradigms shape what gets studied and accepted, and more recent work (e.g., James A. Evans on intellectual narrowing) shows that less diverse perspectives can reduce novelty and scrutiny.
-There’s also direct evidence adjacent to this: audit-style studies (like Yoel Inbar & Joris Lammers, 2012) found some willingness among academics to discriminate based on political views in hiring contexts.
So I'm okay with saying the claim may not be just “ideology caused the replication crisis.” I think I could agree with: when you combine (a) publish-or-perish incentives, (b) low replication norms, and (c) intellectual homogeneity, you should expect weaker ideas to face less adversarial testing and persist longer.
On your last point, reproducibility improving without changes in political makeup actually fits this model pretty well. It suggests that changing incentives and norms (more replication, preregistration, etc.) increases rigor, even if underlying biases remain. That doesn’t mean the biases don’t exist, it means the system is compensating for them better.
To me this is a bit of a “water is wet” situation: in any field, if people largely share priors, it will shape what gets questioned and what doesn’t. The debate is about how much that matters, not whether it exists at all. This was enjoyable I appreciate your commentary.
I'm not going to argue this further, because we are far apart. You clearly want political orientation to be a cause of something for which there is no direct evidence, meanwhile we have direct evidence of real causes that are being addressed and causing change.
Might there be other factors in the replication crisis? Sure! But we can't take one that you prefer and insert it without evidence. If it is a cause, then evidence will be found but until then it's just conjecture that it's even related.